Mind you, it's not all good prog rock, but most of it is actual prog rock. Except they play a lot of Asia for some reason, which as my brother puts it, is "only prog by association."

Anyway, it's mostly latter-day stuff, with some "classic" (old) stuff thrown in for seasoning. Which is p. cool, since a lot of it is stuff I've never heard. It's got it all: cliched, sophomoric "weary of mankind" lyrics (war is bad, mmmkay?), embarrassingly geeky sci-fi themes complete with robot voices, melodic bass lines, 7/8 time, etc. Whatever is most embarrassing will be playing when you show it off to friends and family. Enjoy!

ETA: I especially like how "Gentle Giant" is misspelled in the header to make it sound vaguely anti-Semitic.

I'm listening to Beethoven's 5th right now. It's still kinda mind blowing to me how full of rage that symphony could be. It's hard to convey that level of absolute anger even with modern distorted guitars.

The first movement, epsecially. It's just raw, distilled rage. I can't even IMAGINE what was going through Ludwig's mind when he was writing this, but god DAMN.

I'm listening to Beethoven's 5th right now. It's still kinda mind blowing to me how full of rage that symphony could be. It's hard to convey that level of absolute anger even with modern distorted guitars.

The first movement, epsecially. It's just raw, distilled rage. I can't even IMAGINE what was going through Ludwig's mind when he was writing this, but god DAMN.

I'm listening to it now, but I didn't get the feeling of rage, but it did seem like intense emotion. I guess it depends on what you bring to the music when you listen to it.

Just like a forum, some people need to 'vent' their feelings. Sorry, I was just posting on another forum where some were venting their anger at each other.

__________________The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you donít know anything about. Wayne Dyer

The other night I fell asleep listening to Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream on the Met Opera station on Sirius, and woke up to a piece by a composer I'd never heard before. At midnight (3 a.m. Eastern), they always run broadcasts of large-scale sacred music: masses, oratorios, requiems, etc., and this time the sacred music was Missa Sabrinensis (link to first video in the Youtube playlist) by Herbert Howells, a 20th century British composer. Since I hadn't heard the whole thing, but just enough of the final movement to interest me, I went looking for it on Youtube and there it was. It strikes an interesting balance. It's fundamentally tonal and in the conservative British compositional tradition of Walton, Vaughn Williams, Finzi, Delius, etc., but it explores harmonic complexity that usually isn't part of that tradition. It reminded me a bit of Donald Martino's Paradiso Choruses (another Youtube link).

I also went looking him up on Wikipedia, which is my usual practice when I come across composers I don't know, and found out that his daughter was an actress. Her name, Ursula, led to a glimmer of recognition, and I remembered that she was a British actress who had done a lot of TV work in The Forsyte Saga; The Barchester Chronicles; Upstairs, Downstairs; Midsomer Murders; and, most memorably for me, as Miss Blacklock in the Joan Hickson Miss Marple episode, "A Murder is Announced". So both father and daughter were artistically talented.

I don't know how many people here like contemporary classical music, or how likely they are to see this comment before the audio file expires (today in about six hours), but for those who want something unbelievably wonderful to listen to, you should hear Olga Neuwirth's Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie. Honestly, if she isn't given the Grawemeyer Award for this work, then there is no justice in the world.

A trick I've learned is that if you start the video and then pause it, you can resume it and hear the whole program in full even after the audio file has expired. I've left the browser up and returned to it up to a day later when I was pressed for time.